By Walt Hickey
Wizards in Winter
The box office data is out, and it is stunning for the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s live shows in December. It’s been the single biggest tour in December for years running, earning $48.2 million after selling 581,000 tickets in 70 different shows over the course of December 1 through 30, which if you do the math is way too many shows. Since kicking off the tour in 1999, TSO employed two different ensembles: one in the east and one in the west of the United States. Still, though, the holiday feat requires some remarkable marathons — for 12 days out of the month, TSO is doing four shows a day. It’s a remarkable pace, and the only other touring act that managed more than 10 shows in the month was Pentatonix, which did “just” 16 dates.
Eric Frankenberg, Billboard Pro
Ads
Fox sold out most of its Super Bowl ad inventory back in August for $7 million per 30 seconds, and even the couple extra spots the networks tend to keep in their back pocket sold out back in the fall. However, a few sponsors — State Farm Insurance among them — pulled their spots owing to the recent California wildfires, which meant that Fox got another go at them. According to the network, that led to a number of $8 million ad slots sold. Even the pregame coverage is getting attention, with spots that tended to sell for $2 million fetching $4.5 million.
Seas
Cases of ships being abandoned by their owners around the world and seafarers being stranded without pay in strange ports have doubled in the past three years. Over 3,000 people in 2024 were put in the dire situation of not being paid for months, not having basic supplies provided, or being cut off from communications. While the number may go up with additional reports, last year 230 ships were abandoned, according to the United Nations, situations which in some cases meant crews suffered weeks without fresh water or food.
Helen Wieffering, The Associated Press
Heathrow
London’s Heathrow Airport served 83 million passengers last year, and is pretty much at maximum capacity of 480,000 flights per year. The constant takeoffs and landings — at peak, every 45 seconds — have put a strain on the two runways that exist there, and a yearslong conversation about a controversial third runway is yet again coming up as a potential political question. Even if approved, the runway would be unlikely to open before 2035, and there are about 1,000 homeowners who could be forced to sell to make room for the runway, which is obviously a gigantic can of worms that few politicians want to mess with.
Wildlife
The United States has imported 2.85 billion animals over the last 22 years, including representatives of about 30,000 species. This can be rough on the species — the wild population of studied traded species is down by 62 percent — and for many, they’re not raised in captivity or ranched, but indeed just caught from the wild and imported here. Take, for instance, birds: 1,088 species are mainly raised in captivity before being imported, while 4,692 are mostly wild before being caught and imported.
Michael Tlusty, Alice Catherine Hughes and Andrew Rhyne, The Conversation
Tarpit
A website owner frustrated with the high rate of scraping that AI web crawlers were conducting on his site — 30 million hits from Facebook’s crawler alone — developed Nepenthes, a program that uses the cybersecurity tactic of tarpitting. The technique returns bogus results to scrapers, sending them on meandering and pointless ventures down an infinite maze with no exit link, fed useless data designed to poison AI models in the process, all for not respecting robots.txt. Tarpits were originally used to waste spammer time, but the anti-scraper program, Nepenthes, and another one it inspired, Iocaine, are damn effective, with the latter instantly killing 94 percent of bot traffic fired at a site. When the world hands you minotaurs, make labyrinths.
Mona Lisa
The French government wants to renovate The Louvre, and is funding the expansion and renovation by jacking up the prices for non-European Union countries. The museum is very crowded, hosting 9 million visitors per year, and the French president wants to get that up to 12 million per year. The plan is also to air the place out a bit and move the Mona Lisa into a room of its own. Given that the painting alone draws 80 percent of the crowds, that could go a long way in reducing crowding at least in the rest of the museum by putting it in a new, separate exhibition place underneath the Louvre’s courtyard that can be seen with its own ticket.
Aurelien Breeden, The New York Times
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